The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
A document may be described as a set of information designed and presented as an individual entity. A publication is one example of a document. It may contain logical subunits such as parts, sections, or chapters; but it is typically created, updated, and presented as a single unit. An electronic document is an electronic representation of a paper document encoded in some machine processable form.
In the world of collaboration on electronic documents, multiple users may have the same or similar views of a shared space, which may include editable electronic documents (or simply documents). In some existing systems, one user may owns the space, and that user is the only one who can perform edits. Other users can share a “chat” window, but that content is serialized based on time of arrival. However, existing systems do not permit multiple users to simultaneously edit an electronic document, e.g., a formatted document or a page descriptor language document, such as a document in a Portable Document Format (PDF).
Documents that require input from multiple sources are common in the creative arena. Some examples include newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and advertising pieces. Conventionally, subparts of a document (e.g., individual book chapters) are separately created and edited by individual authors. These subparts are then placed in a document repository and merged into a final-form document by an editor. The final-form document is then passed around for review and comment, to permit the individual authors to update their pieces. The editor then performs another merge and the cycle continues until all of the authors agree on the final version of the document or until the publication deadline is reached. The merging process described above may be cumbersome and time consuming, especially where multiple authors provided updates to the same portion of the document.